Japanese-born Ishiguro won the award for uncovering "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," the Swedish Academy said on awarding the 9 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) prize.

The works of Ishiguro, who moved to Britain as a young child, often touch on memory, time and self-delusion, the Academy said.

"He is a little bit like a mix of Jane Austen, comedy of manners and Franz Kafka," Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said.

"If you mix this a little, not too much, you get Ishiguro in a nutshell."

Ishiguro told the BBC the prize was "flabbergastingly flattering".

"It's a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I'm in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that's a terrific commendation," he said.

Ishiguro said he hoped the prize would be a force for good.

"The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment," he said.

His most well known novel is Man Booker Prize winner The Remains of the Day, which was published in 1989 and turned into an Oscar-nominated movie of the same title. The movie version starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

In The Remains of the Day, a butler at a grand house looks back on a life in service to the aristocracy.

The book's gentle rhythms and Downton Abbey-style setting gradually deepen into a darker depiction of the repressed emotional and social landscape of 20th-century England.

His dystopian work Never Let me Go (2005), starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, was also turned into a movie.

Like The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go is not what it seems. What appears to be the story of three young friends at a boarding school, gradually reveals itself as a dystopian tale with elements of science fiction that asks deep ethical questions.

His 1986 novel An Artist of the Floating World, in which a Japanese artist reflects on his life, was a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.

Ishiguro's most recent work is The Buried Giant (2015), about an elderly couple's trip through an English landscape to meet a son they have not seen in years.